Concept

War

Overview

War is an armed conflict between the armed forces of states, or between governmental forces and armed groups that are organized under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations, or between such organized groups.

It is generally characterized by widespread violence, destruction, and mortality, using regular or irregular military forces. War aims typically involve the pursuit of political, economic, or territorial objectives. Warfare refers to the common activities and characteristics of types of war, or of wars in general. Total war is warfare that is not restricted to purely legitimate military targets, and can result in massive civilian or other non-combatant suffering and casualties.

War has changed in numerous ways over the course of history. Since 1945, great power wars, territorial conquests and war declarations have declined in frequency. However, war in general has not necessarily declined. Civil wars have increased in absolute terms since 1945. Wars have been increasingly regulated by international humanitarian law. Battle deaths and casualties have declined, in part due to advances in military medicine.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where War is discussed.

War is a conflict between two groups, each of which attempts to kill and maim as many as possible of the other group in order to achieve some object which it desires. The object is generally either power or wealth. It is a pleasure to exercise authority over other men, and it is a pleasure to live on the produce of other men’s labor.
Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight
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Indeed, one may say that war is an official abrogation of civilised standards. The manhood of a nation is in war not only allowed, but encouraged and ordered to indulge in behaviour of a kind that is throughout abhorrent to the civilised mind, to commit deeds and witness sights that are profoundly revolting to our æsthetic and moral disposition. All sorts of previously forbidden and buried impulses, cruel, sadistic…
Sándor Ferenczi, Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses
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The question of the immediate international political conditions leading to a war is independent of the value the war possesses from the _historico-materialistic_ point of view. The German war against the Bonapartist Monarchy was historically unavoidable. In that war the right of development was on the German side.
Leon Trotsky, The Bolsheviki and World Peace
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Such a war would still be horrible enough and full of burdens, but it would not have interrupted the development of ethical relations between the large human units, between nations and states. But the war in which we did not want to believe broke out and brought--disappointment. It is not only bloodier and more destructive than any foregoing war, as a result of the tremendous development of weapons of attack and…
Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death
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There is something highly paradoxical in the modern man's relation to war. Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those…
William James, Memories and Studies
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Philosophers who discussed War

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Misanthropy

Place in the tradition

Part of Agnosticism.

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